Re: [Usability] New Menubars

[Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com>]

В 14:42 +0300 на 14.04.2009 (вт), Alex Railean написа:
> Hi Anton,
> 
> 
> > I'm Anton Kerezov and I had an idea about the menubars I posted to Gnome
> > Themes list but was redirected here. So this picture says it almost all:
> > <snip>
> Can you tell me what the purpose of this feature is? i.e. what are you
> trying to improve?

Right now this is just an idea I have. With it I try to improve the
useless monotonous (repeated) actions done in order to access some
submenus (we are not talking about shortcuts but about the visual side)
as well as to innovate on the user interaction side (user workflow).
More on workflow you can read in the pdf I've written (I want to discuss
this with the list but probably in another thread):
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14221984/Shell-Brainstorm


> So far I have some questions:
> 0. for which users category (by skill level) is this feature created?

It is designed for new users that are not used to the traditiona file
system as well as everybody else that wants to work faster (except
advanced users who use many shortcuts). For example if you want to edit
text you will go to the edit menu and it will show it's contents in the
menubar and stay there thus helping you out a lot because you don't need
to click edit all the time to open paragraph or other setting or to copy
paste, undo redo, find. This will be some sort of dynamic toolbar and we
may say that toolbars will exist only rarely as a result. That on the
other hand removes a lot of space on the screen and gives it to the
user. To be honest I use only 1-3 buttons from a toolbar and that are
primarily export, send mail, back, home or undo if there is no shortcut
for it.

  
> 1. what about nested menus, will they appear as a drop-down list or do
>    you plan them to be "flattened" onto the menu area?

This topic come to my mind but I'm still wondering what would be best:
-- Show sub-sub menus as dropdowns.
-- Show small windows as an extension to the menu list with good icons
if possible. They may be pinned too. See this mockup (took a long time
to find a gnome app that has more than one level of menus, not to talk
about 2 or 3):
http://img179.imageshack.us/my.php?image=newmenusystem.png
(there are missing items)
 
-- By introducing good animations (e.g. fade out and move to the entry
for submenu selections and sliding in the new sub-sub menus in). But
this method may prove hard to navigate back and confuse users.


> 2. do you think it is acceptable to use ALT as a trigger to set the
>    focus to the input window?
> 
>    Today we press Alt+<letter> to access a particular menu entry, so
>    why not make it Alt+<first N letters> to naturally extend the
>    existing method?

It would be good but as many of the gnome desktops are translated in
many languages and people use mainly English (as me) these shortcuts are
not working. So a good thing will be that it exist another visual manner
involving the mouse. What do you think?


>    It will be in conflict with the fact that for some menu entries the
>    Alt+<letter> key is not always the first letter of the menu item.

That is the other problem but menuitems have description (as they
usually have displayed in the statusbar) and the search could be
extended via user option to that description is included too.

Another solution is to have text search for submenu items and if there
is a match a auto-complete list will be shown.


>    Also, not to say that Vista is a perfect example to follow, but in
>    there they hide menus by default and Alt shows/hides it - in other
>    words the choice of Alt will be quite consistent with the other
>    environments.

Agree.


Best regards, 
Anton